Booster shot

REGARDLESS OF THE RESULT, THE PERFORMANCE OF THE WOMEN’S TEAM WILL GIVE A HUGE FILLIP TO HOCKEY IN INDIA

- NEERU BHATIA

If there is one thing that the Indian women’s hockey team knows, it is survival. On the field or off it. Captain Rani Rampal’s family has fought poverty; her father was a tonga puller in Shahbad, Haryana. Midfielder Neha Goyal, 24, escaped an abusive, alcoholic father; she worked with her mother in a cycle factory to earn two meals a day. Defender Nikki Pradhan, 27, hails from Hesal, a Naxal hotbed in Jharkhand; her sister worked as a labourer to buy her a hockey stick. Midfielder Nisha Warsi, from Sonipat, Haryana, found encouragement in her tailor father, but her wings were clipped when a paralytic stroke hit him. Her mother worked in a foam factory to make ends meet, and Warsi eventually made it to the national team.

It is this grit and determination that shocked powerhouse Australia in the quarterfinals in Tokyo. This was the third time the Indian women’s team had made it to an Olympics—the previous being Moscow 1980 and Rio 2016—and this was its most successful outing. In Rio, the team finished its campaign without a win.

Five years later, the women had a disappointing start once again; the Netherlands beat them 5-1. They then lost to Germany and Britain. A repeat of Rio was on the cards. The aim was a quarterfinal finish, for which they had to beat Ireland and South Africa. They did it. “We did not have many practice matches before the Olympics, so we kept telling the girls to improve with every match,” chief coach Sjoerd Marijne said of the early matches. “After we lost to the Netherlands, it looked as if everything was shattered; it was not. We only needed to make a few small improvements.”